Dad, Will You Teach Me Calligraphy?
- Dec. 2021
- To the work’s website
- Print and calligraphy on rice paper; Video installation
- Keywords: Machine Learning, Pix2Pix, Chinese Calligraphy
Dad, Will You Teach Me Calligraphy? brings to the forefront a topic about learning and machine learning, and the layered relationship between a father and a child. This is a project I created in collaboration with my dad.
After witnessing my dad practicing calligraphy year by year, I decided to collect his calligraphy works and train a machine-learning algorithm that learns, or imitates, his style. The algorithm is also capable to generate non-existent Chinese characters—characters that look like Chinese but actually make no sense. Therefore, on the left, we get a purely generated calligraphy piece written in a false language, in my dad’s style.
On the right, is dad’s attempt of recreating the generated work—in his familiar brushstroke style, while the language background was stripped away. Like those pupils learning calligraphy, he started imitating his own style from scratch. This two-way imitation—machine imitating dad’s style and dad imitating the generated output—is where the intimate relationships between dad and calligraphy, digital and analogue, dad and me, get to be explored and perceived.
LEFT: generated calligraphy; RIGHT: dad’s replication of the generated calligraphy
*The custom software was developed greatly based on the idea of Recursive Radical Packing Language proposed by artist Huang Lingdong. Part of the code was borrowed/modified from Lingdong’s original project documented on Github.
Exhibited at SCM Annual, Singing Wave Gallery, HK Awarded SCM Fountain Prize